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OTTAWA—Frank Luntz, one of America’s leading Republican consultants, is depressed. Why should Canadians care?

In a remarkable interview with The Atlantic’s Molly Ball, Luntz recently bared his troubled soul. He says he has been jarred into hopelessness by what his work has taught him about the mood of the U.S. electorate.

“They were contentious and argumentative. They didn’t listen to each other as they once had. They weren’t interested in hearing other points of view. They were divided one against the other, black vs. white, men vs. women, young vs. old, rich vs. poor. ‘They want to impose their opinions rather than express them,’ is the way he describes what he saw.”

Luntz is no stranger to Canadian politics. As far back as the 1980s, he worked with Preston Manning and the old Reform Party. Shortly after Stephen Harper won his first election victory in 2006, Luntz paid a call on Ottawa to speak to a conservative thinkers’ group called Civitas. Influential members of Harper’s new government were on hand to hear Luntz’s advice on how to seal and grow the newly found strength of the Conservative party.

Elizabeth Thompson, then a reporter with the Montreal Gazette, posted a vigil outside the room and recorded Luntz’s remarks.

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He told the group that he had a brief meeting with the new PM the day before. “I met him in his office yesterday and he takes me over for a photograph and I’m thinking: ‘Why would I want a photograph of you?’ And then I forgot: Oh yeah, you’re the prime minister.”

In his remarks to Civitas, Luntz noted several times that Canadians, collectively, were a much nicer group than Americans — or at least that’s how he saw things in 2006. Now, nearly eight years later, it’s worth noting that Luntz has opted to relocate to Las Vegas, not to Canada, to cure his gloom.

You have to wonder if that’s perhaps because he’s been casting his gaze north of the border as well, and witnessing the same, soul-sucking spirit rampant among the Canadian electorate. The Canadian political discussion that takes place on Twitter, under the hashtag #cdnpoli, is often a laboratory for the kind of angry polarization that’s rattled Luntz in the U.S., not to mention the bizarre politics on display of late at Toronto city hall.

So I asked a couple of respected Canadian pollsters whether our own politics were headed to the same dark place.

Nik Nanos does extensive opinion-tracking here in Canada and he’s also a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Centre in the U.S. He doesn’t rule out a Luntz-like scenario here, especially in a first-past-the-post system that regularly gives victory to parties representing fewer than 50 per cent of Canadian voters, leaving a disgruntled majority discontent with the outcome.

But perhaps because we’re “nicer,” as Luntz puts it, Nanos sees a potential “Canadian twist” to this angry mood. Rather than yell past each other, we’ll just shut down the conversation.

“We should be concerned that talking politics could become stigmatized like talking about religion . . . a topic to be avoided,” Nanos says. “If that increasingly becomes the case, then what will that mean for political engagement and dialogue?”

Darrell Bricker, chief executive officer of Ipsos Public Affairs, said he read The Atlantic piece with some interest and yes, he and some of his colleagues discussed whether Luntz is suffering from a condition that his own high-octane, Republican spin-mastering helped create. Or, as Bricker more colourfully puts it: Is he “the guy who created the Frankenstein monster that’s now chasing him around the woods?”

Fundamentally, though, Bricker believes that Luntz has lost touch with a population he claimed to intimately understand. “The Republican proposition that he helped build no longer exists,” says Bricker. Luntz simply hasn’t accepted that Democrats have built a new electoral coalition of immigrants and people who previously didn’t take part in politics.

Put simply, Bricker is saying that American voters are still talking to each other, but they’re not speaking the language that Luntz — author of Words That Work — can understand.

Still, there’s no denying that segments of the Canadian electorate now closely resemble the dystopian public that’s crushed Luntz’s spirit. Michael Valpy’s recent Atkinson Series in the Star, on the subject of social cohesion, sent up some worrying flares about unraveling political connections in this country. “This is a society losing its glue. How far down the road before it bubbles to the surface?” Valpy wrote.

Maybe rather than gamble his future on Vegas, Luntz should come back to Canada, and tell us how to avoid the diseases now afflicting the U.S. body politic.

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